Calandra
by hauntedmelody
Summary: A postwar LOTR fanfiction that I started during a free period a while ago and decided to continue. Rated to be safe. Please R&R!
1. Chapter 1

The sun had just risen, and yet the city of Minas Tirith was already busy. Merchants were setting up their stalls, calling greetings and friendly insults to their business competitors.

A lone girl with a drab scarf tied over her hair and wearing a well-made, dark gray dress walked through the market with an air of joy and breathed in the fresh morning air. The merchants around her ignored her, for which she was grateful. Anonymity was a rare gift to be enjoyed. She did not want to be bothered anyway; since she was looking for specific goods, and she didn't need the merchants calling out hyperbolic descriptions of their items and enticing, understated prices. She passed the ubiquitous food stalls, as well as the foreign weavings, and the expensive, imported wines. Stopping at a book booth, she browsed for a short time, and finally bought a book of old myths that she had never seen before. She continued to weave through the crowds. Suddenly she spotted what she wanted. Making her way towards it, she smiled at the old trader.

"Good morning," she said.

He looked her over. She looked just like any pretty middle-class daughter, and most girls in that station went to market for ribbons and dresses, not swords. In his younger days, he would have smiled back and flirted a little, but those responses had not come out of the middle-aged man for years.

"What do you want with me, girl?" he answered more than a bit rudely.

"I would like to buy one of your swords, sir."

"You? A girl?" the man guffawed. "Now, young miss, what do you really want?"

"A sword," she said, no longer smiling. At that moment, a wisp of her hair was stolen from the scarf by the wind, and the old man recognized her from its black color. It was said that only one in the entire capital of Gondor possessed hair the color of ravens.

"Begging your pardon, my Lady," he stumbled quickly, and gave a jerky bow. "I -- I didn't recognize you, you see, and . . . " he trailed off.

The princess Calandra sighed. "You weren't meant to." She tucked the hairs back into their fabric cage. "Now may I buy one?"

"Yes, Princess -- any one you wish -- how about this one? Man I bought it off said it was Dwarven, it's got rubies and emeralds --" Cal tuned him out and shifted through the myriad of swords. One caught her eye. The hilt was plainly sturdy and well-made, but not excessively ornate; a single, polished stone was set on the edge. Cal drew it out of its hackneyed scabbard, surprised by its lightness, and found it had perfect balance. It was nicely sharp as well, she discovered as she placed her finger gently on the blade, and only one look at its scabbard told her it was completely weatherproof.

"-- this one, look at that gold inlay! It has a history, I'll tell you about it . . ."

"I'll take this one, sir," she interrupted softly.

"That one, my Lady?" he looked perplexed. "I have much finer swords"

"This one," she repeated, and smiled. "Please." She reached into her small purse. Coins dropped out of her hand onto the merchant's table, enough to easily cover twice the worth of the sword.

"Have a good day, sir. Namarie."

Calandra strode up the streets from the third tier of the city to her home on the sixth. As the grandchild of King Elessar, she was easily recognized in the City and rarely had the full freedom of anonymity. She had always hated being a Princess; her mother, Roswen, was the youngest daughter of the King, and her father a Rohirric lord who had died when Roswen was pregnant with twins and Cal was three. After his death Roswen had withdrawn from public and family life, preferring to study books and help Aragorn with politics than to raise her children.

"Cal!" she heard her younger sister, Aryane, calling. Aryane was thirteen, five years Cal's junior, and loved being a princess. Aryane had always been addicted to old stories and mythology, and there was always a princess in those tales; she found it a very romantic position.

"Cal, why were you at market?"

Cal swore under her breath. Her sister was often too quick; she had registered Cal's clothing, basket, and purse in a split second.

"Why were you there?" Aryane repeated. "Did Mother not ban you from going?"

Calandra stopped. Only two weeks before, she had been caught sneaking down to the third tier by herself, only to be forbidden to go without an escort again. There was no way Aryane could have known about that; Cal hadn't told anyone, and she doubted Mother had.

"Aryane, did you eavesdrop again?"

Her sister flushed. "Maybe," she said, not meeting Cal's eyes.

"I'll make a deal with you," Cal said. "You don't tell anyone I went to market again, and I'll give you the gift that I bought for you there."

"Done!" Aryane squealed happily. She waltzed over to Cal and tried to peer into the basket. Calandra pulled it away.

"Later," she promised. After I get a chance to take the sword out of the basket, she thought guiltily. "Come to my rooms in a few minutes."

Aryane grinned. "I will," she said. "I love presents!"


	2. Chapter 2

Calandra snuck back into her rooms with a sigh. She always enjoyed her small bouts of freedom, and hated when they were finished. Reaching behind her head, she untied the kerchief and shook her long black waves of hair down. She had always wished to cut it short, but she knew her mother would die of heart failure if Cal ever did. _Not that she ever sees me,_ Cal thought bitterly, before banishing the thought from her mind.

Crossing the room, Calandra entered her closet and pulled the dress over her head. Rolling it into a tight ball, she buried it in a hatbox under a pile of old letters and dressed herself in a slightly (yet only slightly) more royal array. Usually her ladies-in-waiting would be standing two feet from her, shaking their heads and urging her to choose a fancier gown.

Her ladies despaired of her; while they wanted her to enter into a profitable marriage, she, the ever practical one, knew that however hard they tried, she would never make such a conquest. Men wanted meek wives; beautiful, soft-spoken women who wanted nothing but to embroider, dance, and gossip all day. She had never fit into those circles, though Aryane did with no difficulty. Her sister saw nothing wrong with fooling others into thinking she was shallower and less intelligent than she actually was. Aryane would make a good marriage; yet Cal, with her dislike of anything frilly and her distance from the throne, would not. Though Calandra had the title of Princess, her mother had an elder brother and sister, who had four children each. She was far enough from the throne that barely any man would look at her twice until her cousins were married.

A knock came on the door. Calandra started, took the book out of the basket, and shoved her wrapped sword under the bed. She called Aryane in.

She bounced through the door; Cal reflected that the five-year age difference between her and thirteen-year-old Aryane seemed huge when the behaved like this.

Aryane walked over to her sister and smiled sweetly. "Calandra," she said, "may I have my present?"

She laughed. Of all the qualities Aryane possessed, she was severely lacking in tact.

"Of course," Cal said as she reached behind her and presented to her younger sister the book of old myths she had bought from the bookseller's.

"Cal! You didn't!" cried Aryane as she opened and flipped through the leather-bound volume. "It's _beautiful._" She sat on the edge of the bed, already engrossed in reading.

The black-haired princess watched her sister, smiling sadly. She couldn't bear the thought that this might be the last day she ever would see her sister for a very long time—if not forever. A month before, she had decided to leave the city, and maybe even Gondor itself.

She walked to the window and leaned out, looking across the city. For years, she had felt oppressed and out of place. When she was fourteen, her world had begun to shrink uncontrollably around her, leaving her feeling out of control of her own life. Calandra pushed back the long sleeve of her dress and ran her thumb across the white scars on her inner wrist. The city had seemed to small to properly contain her spirit. After a few months, she had finally quit cutting herself, though Minas Tirith still never seemed to grow. Instead, she focused her energies on sneaking out to the market, conversing with the people, bullying (or flirting) boys her age into a sword or archery lesson, and pretending happiness. Her scars never left her, though she had hid them well ever since.

"Cal?" Aryane said, startling her out of her reverie.

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

Calandra pushed her sleeve down, turned, and crossed the room. She swept Aryane into a tight embrace. "I love you, little sister," she whispered, blinking back tears. "You're always welcome."

That night, with her bags completely packed, Calandra sat down to compose what she suspected would be the hardest letter she would ever write.

_Dear Aryane,_ she began. She stopped. What was there to say?

After five drafts, a few ruined by tears smudging the ink, she wrote that she had never been happy in Minas Tirith, and that she was leaving. _I don't know where I'm going,_ she explained. _Tell them not to come after me—if I come back, I will decide when._ She enclosed the key to her rooms, and ended her letter, saying: _Aryane, do not worry for me; I shall be better off away than I ever was here. This has nothing to do with you. For the last four years, you have been the only thing keeping me here. I love you more than you will ever know._

Sealing the envelope closed, she willed herself not to cry and picked up her packs. Calandra slipped the letter under Aryane's door as she walked down the winding halls while everyone else was asleep. Saddling her horse at the stables, she put her things in the saddlebags and galloped down the tiers of the city. Bidding the sleepy guard a good night, she raced out the doors and toward her freedom.


	3. Chapter 3

_She stumbled off the saddle, nearly falling in her cloud of fever and fatigue. Her clothes were tattered and in general disarray: a formerly violet travel-cloak was brown with wear, age, and dirt; blonde hair was nearly caked with grease and grime. Through her mental fog, somehow she managed to crawl the few feet between the woods' end and the edge of the stream. She bent down over the water and drank deeply. The girl coughed, hacked, and tried to no avail to push herself back on her gelding._

_She was too weak, and collapsed. Later she would remember faintly thinking she should move, hide, or at least tether her horse, but all the cares in the world faded, with her consciousness, into blackness._

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The late afternoon sun barely shone through the thick canopy of the forest. Some birds sang, and every so often, a deer rustled through the bushes within earshot; yet for the city-bred Calandra, it might as well have been perfect silence. The usual uproar of the city was gone, which she still found hard to believe. Before, she had only been out of Dashar City with her mother—and, therefore, with entourages and wagons full of _things._ It was blissful to be alone.

Her mare paused to nibble on a patch of plants. She urged Kali back into a walk and breathed the damp air deeply. Holding her reins in one hand, she reached out with the other to touch in passing the rough bark of the trees and their soft leaves or sharp needles. The forest around her hardly seemed real.

This was the third day she had been riding northwest, pausing briefly to rest every so often and sleeping under the stars every night. She had grossly underestimated the amount of food she would need for a week and had already run out. Her stomach rumbled loudly to remind her of this, disturbing the peace of the woods, but she ignored it. She was hoping to run into a village by nightfall so she could buy loaves of bread and maybe some dried and salted meat.

She had attempted to hunt, with very undesirable results. It turned out hitting a stationary target with an arrow was much easier than taking down a running hare. After a few disastrous occurrences, with culminated with fishing through what she realized after was poison ivy to find a strayed arrow, she resigned herself to going hungry until she reached the next sign of civilization. Scratching absentmindedly at the rashes on her arms, she smiled. Why should she care about being itchy? She was free!

On the other hand, however—she woke every morning with a nagging sense of ennui. She was free, yes, but where was the adventure, the charm of being able to go wherever, whenever? She did not see any merit in waking on hard ground cold and hungry. Whenever she felt that way, she would smother it quickly with memories of petticoats, being followed everywhere by ladies-in-waiting, formal dinners, and the like.

Whatever the rest of her felt like, at least she could be clean. Finding her way toward the nearby creek she heard, she tied her acquiescing mare to a nearby tree. Undressing down to her underclothes, Calandra waded into the freezing-cold (and yet refreshing) water. Her legs instantly turned a loud shade of protesting red, but she splashed in the brook until she finally felt clean. She tried to guess whether the closest village would be the one she had circumvented purposefully the day before or the one whose upstream existence was really only a guess.

All of a sudden, Calandra heard her horse give a surprised—or fearful?—whinny. Treading water, she made her way quietly to the banks and pulled on her breeches and fitted tunic as she peered through the trees to locate what had startled Kali. A rustle in the green growth made her fumble for her sword, but when a second horse came forward, she lowered it. The gelding was riderless, though the saddlebags were packed, as if someone had merely left it. Stung with curiosity, Calandra gathered her things and led both animals into the brush the gelding had exited. She carefully followed the trail, which went in upstream's general direction.

_I wonder what happened, for someone to lose this horse,_ Calandra thought bemusedly. _Did they just turn him loose?_

She was so intent on her thoughts and the path that she was startled when she stumbled out of the woods again, farther north, and saw by the brook a limp, unconscious woman.

"Oh, sweet Eru," Cal cried, distractedly dropping the reins of both horses in order to rush to the fallen girl's side. She turned the girl over and felt her forehead, which burned dangerously. Calandra didn't know herblore; she didn't know who this girl could be. She did know that she could never be able to take care of the girl properly and she needed help herself if she expected to. Praying silently that she would attract the attention of good people—_perhaps villagers!—_and not the bandits rumored to be in the area, she raised her fingers to her mouth and let out a series of shrill, ear-splitting whistles. p 

The horses shied away, but she tied them loosely to the nearby tree and kept on giving short, whistled blasts of sound, crooning calming words to them in between. She paused to drag the girl to higher ground, lay her out more comfortably, and then continued to signal. Keeping on eye on the feverish girl, Calandra sat down by the stream to wait.

---------------------

Flynn sprawled at the base of a resplendent oak tree, chewing a piece of bread and glaring irritably up at his younger sister. His annoyance was just, he told himself. Though from his recently sprained ankle and Adrian's acrophobia, she remained the only one in their small party to be able to climb the tree, Kaie need not crow her delight at seeing sky down with such enthusiasm. It only reminded him of the dark, sylvan air around him; for though he enjoyed nature, he hated not being able to see the horizons.

"Flynn? Adrian? I figured out which way is north," Kaie called down.

"It took you a long time," Flynn muttered, as Adrian chuckled.

Kaie climbed down a few branches and jumped the rest of the way. "Actually," she said, smiling sweetly, "I discovered that in the first two seconds. The rest of the time I was enjoying the breeze."

"Kaie…" Flynn warned, as Adrian laughed harder. "Please. Stop."

"Stop what?" she asked, completely wide-eyed and innocent. At his glare, however, she relented. "I'm sorry, Flynn," she said, still smiling.

Adrian broke in. "We should set out," he said. He paused, and then turned quickly. "What's that?" he asked.

"What?" asked Kaie. "Do you hear something?"

"Whistling," he answered shortly. "We should follow it. It may be a help signal." _Or a bandit's call to his fellows_, was the unspoken addition that they all heard.

The siblings listened carefully, until they both nodded slowly. "I agree," said Kaie, suddenly serious. "Let's go."

They helped Flynn mount his horse—with his sprained ankle, it was difficult for him—and then climbed on their own as they headed toward the noise, hoping their attempt to assist a stranger wouldn't turn into a fight.


	4. Chapter 4

They rode with as much alacrity as was possible while still remaining soundless, which equated to virtually none. Kaie felt her stomach give a nervous flop at the unknown. She prayed hastily for her companions' safety, especially that of her injured brother, and then returned to the task at hand.

The three young travelers followed the whistling through the underbrush, picking out paths through the growth. The shrill sound grew in volume and clarity with every passing moment. When they came so close the noise was almost tangible, Adrian, at the front, held up a hand. They drew to a halt. The clamor stopped. Kaie reach for her bow and notched an arrow. Adrian and Flynn both grasped their own swords.

"Let's go," Flynn whispered, and they spurred their horses to leap out of the trees.

Calandra wondered how much longer she could risk the signal. Everyone within two miles would know there was someone in distress here, and not all of them would be kind. She began to regret her decision. _After all,_ she thought, _it's not as if you have the means to defend yourself. A sword is never useful to one who cannot wield it properly._ Stopping, she bent to check the girl again, and discovered that her forehead seemed even more scorching than before. _Shall I take her to the next village?_ she wondered. What would she do, she questioned, if the poor girl died? _What if she's only wandering from fever, and really belongs in a town nearby?_ Calandra needed to bring her to a healer, or at the least an herbwoman.

"I need to get out of here. How stupid could I have _been_?" she berated herself softly. Cal stooped down in an attempt to hoist the fevered girl onto her horse, but in next to no time she learned that she was too heavy. "Damn the bloody girl!" she muttered. "I can't just leave her behind…"

A few seconds of frenzied hurry passed before a crash made Cal jump up in surprise and dismay. Three armed riders had hurtled out of the brush. They did not look friendly. _Thrice damn my luck_, she thought swiftly, asking the Valar only to be able to live and save the girl. _It is my fault, after all._ She grabbed the dagger out of her belt and tried her best to look brave.

They stopped a few yards from her, to her relief and confusion, and stared at her with an odd blend of puzzlement and apprehension. She gripped her modest stiletto firmly, and barely allowed herself to relax a bit and look them over. All three were breathing hard and shallowly. The one aiming a longbow's arrow directly at her own pounding heart looked to be about her age, with very long, wavy brown-black hair and matching eyes. One companion shared a cropped version of her tresses, and something in his face and dark eyes recommended him as the girl's brother. The third companion was blond, and had something like amusement written in his eyes, though his handsome face looked almost too carefully composed. Calandra suddenly felt very foolish, standing defiantly with only her diminutive knife.

"Flynn, Kaie, lower your weapons," the blonde said, with the same half-smile, as he placed his own sword back in its scabbard. "There are no bandits here."

"I'll do what I will, when I will," snapped the girl with irritation, but she lowered her bow. Her brother—Flynn, he had been called—returned his sword to its case, but sat with such tautness Calandra could scarcely imagine how quickly he would draw it if needed.

"Do you care to introduce yourself?" the girl asked sharply, but without any particular hostility. She sounded more disconcerted than anything else.

Calandra realized after a moment that she had failed to think up a name by which to go, much less a persona to play. "Sydha," she said, after a moment of awkward silence, naming a childhood friend of hers. They seemed to be waiting for more, so her brain wildly grasped for anything—_anything_—she could tell them. "Sydha, daughter of Audic of the Guard of the Citadel."

After a few more seconds of silence, Flynn broke the silence by unhorsing and bowing courteously to her. "All right, _Sydha_," he said, half smiling. "Evidently you have no desire to share with us your history. That is merely to be inspected of a stranger to whom we are only half introduced. I am Flynn, son of Ossian of Rohan, and this is my sister, Kaie; the nice one, over there, is Adrian, son of Uryan of anywhere and nowhere." Calandra looked at him sharply, to see if he was mocking her, but no malice was in his dancing eyes.

Adrian spoke up as he swung off his horse. "We can see that there are no bandits, ruffians, or colossal man-eating animals in the vicinity, so if you would please tell us why, exactly, you gave such a call of distress, I'm sure my companions and I would be much gratified."

Kaie rolled her eyes and hopped off as well. She looked friendlier now that it seemed "Sydha" wouldn't try anything stupid.

Calandra knew, even now, that none of the three were foolish; she would be willing to wager her horse on the fact that they had already noticed the limp body behind her. She also intuitively trusted them, and for some reason it never even occurred to her it may not be a good idea to converse. If they wanted to pretend that they couldn't see the ailing young woman, she decided, it was fine with her.

"Riding through the woods, I came upon this girl," she said, motioning. "I felt obligated to stop. She is unconscious, with fever-dreams, and is burning with the illness. I know my strengths, and herblore is not one of them. To save her—to heal her—I need help."

"And why should we help you?" Kaie asked kindly.

Calandra shrugged. "This poor girl may die if you do not," she said simply. "I will aid her to the best of my abilities, but my abilities do not extend far."

"Fair enough," she said, and smiled. "We will stay for a few days—if that is all right for you two."

Adrian nodded his assent, and Flynn grunted his, after a short moment.

"Wonderful," Kaie said, and Calandra's heart warmed to her. "Now. I do not know much about healing myself, but if your talents are as bad as you claim they are, I may be able to help…."


	5. Chapter 5

By nightfall, Calandra was convinced she had made the right choice in summoning help. Contrary to her disclaimers, Kaie showed a surplus of healing knowledge, and Adrian provided the first full meal Cal had eaten in days. The four—and the unknown girl—had found a small clearing by ruins to use for shelter. According to Kaie, she and her companions had used the worn stone wreckage as a camp before. Laughingly, she had informed "Sydha" that the local bandits thought it was haunted, so they were never bothered.

"Haunted?" Cal had asked, eying their camp warily.

"Are you scared?" Kaie had teased, before seeing Calandra's distress and adding: "Don't be. We've stayed here a myriad times before, and not a hint of the supernatural has ever bothered _me_."

The ancient vestige was rather small, being merely a grouping of crumbling walls of stone on the zenith of a little hill, but it was a refuge for the group. Calandra was cautious, conscious of Kaie's earlier comment, but as soon as they settled in, she felt comfortable; the site was anything but eerie, but instead, it felt quite peaceable and ancient. They set up a tent out of long sticks and a wool blanket for the "infirmary", as Flynn laughingly called it, then each set out their own blankets and things.

As darkness fell and the moon rose, night found Kaie keeping watch over the still hallucinating invalid and the rest sitting around a small fire. Calandra had learned many new things about her new companions while talking with them. All three had grown up in a small Northwestern settlement of Dúnedain and were now "trying their fortunes" in the world, in Flynn's words—or, as Adrian had quipped, "indulging the others' wish to be rid of us". The two were currently telling stories, each trying to top the other's latest, with increasing amounts of hyperbolical and exaggerated descriptions of battles and their heroic deeds, leaving Calandra in stitches and Kaie to frequently yell wry comments from the makeshift tent. Flynn had just finished his last, which contained epic temerity and man-eating giants (among other things), when Adrian looked at Calandra, smiled, and said, "What about you, Sydha? What's your story? How come you to be here, so far from hearth and home?"

Several long and painfully silent seconds stretched by before Calandra, caught quite by surprise, managed a tense laugh and said, "Oh, you know, I'm just a runaway princess."

Flynn and Adrian laughed harder than the weak joke warranted in an attempt to break the awkwardness, and asked no more questions, talking instead about the surroundings and the hunting in the area. Calandra's joviality was nevertheless quite shaken, and she excused herself before long in order to lie down.

Curled up in her blanket beneath the abundance of stars, Cal cursed to herself. She loved her good luck in encountering kind strangers—not only for helping with the poor fevered girl, but for pure camaraderie as well; she wished, however, that it would be possible to forget her previous life and start anew. She hoped they had seen her reluctance to divulge her past—if they only knew she had told the truth!—and would refrain from asking more awkward questions. How she hated keeping secrets, yet she knew it wouldn't be beneficial to share her identity with everyone she met. Calandra calmed herself slowly by picturing Aryane in her mind, and writing an imaginary letter to send. She longed to send a real note, but knew there was no way she could.

She tossed and turned in discomfort, not caused by the soft ground but from her thoughts, until she finally drifted into a deep sleep.

Kaie placed a damp cloth on the girl's burning forehead and forced more willow-bark tea down her throat before exiting the crude tent. She walked softly out to the fire where her brother and friend were conferring quietly. They motioned to her to join them. Brushing her dark hair out of her face, she sighed from exhaustion and sent them a questioning glance. "So—what do you think of our new little friend?"

"Ssh, she may still be awake. And she is hardly little," Adrian said, moving back to include her in the circle. "I guess she's older than you are, if only by a year. She's smart, too, if completely uninformed about traveling and the out-of-doors. She is fairly sociable, has a sense of humor, and is quite obviously not who she says she is."

"'Sydha'," Flynn continued, nodding agreement, "wholly froze up when we asked why she was gone from home. If she weren't such a bad liar, I would question if we should even trust her. As it is, I think she is completely guileless and kindhearted, but very unlikely to want to share her past."

"She is probably a runaway," Adrian added. "She's a bit ignorant—most likely pampered—but she will work hard, I think, if she stays with us. Besides, I like her."

Kaie answered, "That's what I thought too; and I like her as well. She seems…interesting."

"Enough about her," announced Flynn decisively. "There's nothing we can do about her for now. What about your anonymous patient?"

His sister sighed. "She has a bad fever; my guess is that it was brought on by cold or exhaustion—almost certainly both. She will be fine eventually, though it is lucky she was found when she was, or else she might not have had as good of a chance. Her fever will break tomorrow, maybe; a day after she will, in all likelihood, be sitting up and talking. Then we will have a better idea of who she may be."

Flynn shrugged. "I searched through her saddlebags—" Kaie raised her eyebrows—"and I didn't find much of interest, or any clues as to her identity."

"You went through her things?" asked Adrian contemptuously. "How will she trust us if she puzzles that out? Bad enough that she will wake in a strange place with a group of people who she has never even _met_—"

"Never mind it," Kaie said. "We shall cross that bridge then, I suppose, though I like it even less than you do. For now, I am enormously tired, and would dearly love to sleep. I vote that Flynn must keep watch tonight," she added, grinning, "because he was rude enough to investigate our guest's luggage."

"Fine, little sister," Flynn agreed. "I shall. Would you like me to watch over 'our guest' as well?"

"Your look is a bit _too_ innocent, darling elder brother," Kaie observed wickedly. "Do you have some kind of interest in this mystery woman?" Adrian laughed. "She _is_ quite good-looking when not delusional, you know."

Flynn laughed too heartily, causing Kaie and Adrian to exchange knowing looks.

"Go ahead, Flynn," Kaie said, grinning. "Wake me at dawn, or before, if her temperature has risen any. Good night."

"Good night," Flynn and Adrian assented. The three settled down.


End file.
